SoLong TiVo

In an effort to conserve cash and not become the kinds of homeowners who live in one room of their home, spending their free time sewing sock monkeys and watching cassette tapes of The Mikado on their VCRs by the light of a single, unshaded lamp (as I actually did spend one harrowing month in Wilmington back in 2001), we have had to make some cuts, and sadly, TiVo found itself on the chopping block this week.

This was depressing to Ben and particularly to me, as I had developed an almost gross love for the machine itself, with its happy glowing be-legged television icon and its Wonka-esque booping noises. After a rocky start, in which TiVo became convinced that we were middle-aged black people who enjoyed reruns of Martin and Amen (where are they still showing Amen? Does anyone even remember this show besides me? And TiVo?), we have gotten along famously. By the end, TiVo had introduced us to some of our favorite friends-- Bill Kurtis of American Justice; the guy who does all the voice-overs for the various Battle Against Nature shows on the History Channel ("Chase doesn't know it yet, but this could be the very tree that kills him"); the plucky interventionists of Intervention (my favorite: the one who always tells the drug addicts that they have a family "that loves them like crazy").

But Evil Empire Cable offers a vaguely similar, sort-of adequate faux TiVo (FoVo) for ten dollars less a month, and for some reason, adding it to our list of services somehow lowered our cable bill, not even counting TiVo, by another fourteen, so we had to let it go.

Not, however, without a fight-- Ben did some of the most strenuous flirting I have ever witnessed with the TiVo representative in an attempt to get the far superior Two-Shows-at-Once TiVo receiver out of her-- our logic being that if TiVo could out perform FoVo, we could keep it. The exchange went something like this:

Ben: Hey, baby.

TiVo Rep: I hear you want to cancel your TiVo service? That makes me sad.

Ben: I don't want you to be sad, Sugar Tits. Daddy wants you to be happy. And you know how you could make Daddy happy? With the Two-Shows-at-Once TiVo.

TiVo Rep: Aw, baby, you know I can't just give away the Two-Vo.

Ben: For me you could. Because if you do, we could make sweet love all night long. And I'll even scratch your back after. Awww, yeah.

TiVo Rep: Your offer intrigues me, as I enjoy making sweet love with TiVo fans. Let me see what I can do.

But sadly, in the end she could do nothing for us, even after Ben promised to wash her car in the nude and buy her the rights to the photos of Brad and Angelina's newest babies. (At which point, he called her a Tease-Vo and hung up on her.) (Also, please note: this conversation may not have actually occurred in this way.) So our TiVo box moulders, unplugged and dusty, on a shelf in our basement, while FoVo usurps its glory and spits in our faces by recording the same episode of Intervention four times for no reason. I loved the episode like crazy, but still.

Rabid!

Rabies has been popping up far too often for my taste lately. First, in the season premiere of my (sadly cut short by the writers' strike) all-time favorite show, The Office, in which Michael staged a fun run to raise rabies awareness; then in Rant, Chuck Palahniuk's newest book, in which the main character starts a rabies epidemic. But most disturbingly in a show that our TiVo thought we would enjoy, "The Girl Who Survived Rabies," the title of which is pretty much self-explanatory.

My previous encounters with rabies were pretty much limited to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which the main character is forced to kill her beloved Tea Cake (who is a human, and not a lap dog, despite the connotations of his name) when he is infected with the disease. Rabies is something that happens to characters in 20th Century Literature Class novels, not to me!

But now, surrounded by this glut of rabies mania, I am forced to assume my fallback position, which is, if everyone is talking about it, then I probably have it. Which is why, at two o'clock today when I cut my finger on the bathroom paper towel dispenser, a danger sign flashed: RABIES!

I am completely and totally aware that paper towel dispensers are not alive, and thus incapable of carrying the rabies virus. But at that moment, I fully expected to begin foaming at the mouth and develop an irrational fear of water, and figured by the end of the night, Ben would have dispatched me neatly with a shotgun.

What is the lesson in this? Has my rabies awareness been raised too much? Should I stop trusting TiVo? Am I, maybe, a bit too paranoid? Are the terror segments on local news channels meant for me?

I don't know. But all this talk of tea cakes is making me hungry.